Thought Leadership

Who Knew VIP?

January 14, 2015 • 2 MIN READ
By Mark Olen

“Who Knew?” about verification IP (VIP), was the theme of a recent DeepChip post by John Cooley on December 18.  More specifically the article states, “Who knew VIP was big and that Wally had a good piece of it?”  We knew.

We knew that ASIC and FPGA design engineers can choose to buy design IP from several alternative sources or build their own, but that does not help with the problem of verification.  We knew that you don’t really want to rely on the same source that designed your IP, to test it.  We knew that you don’t want to write and maintain bus functional models (BFMs) or more complete VIP for standard protocols.  Not that you couldn’t, but why would you if you don’t have to?

We also knew that verification teams want easy-to-use VIP that is built on a standard foundation of SystemVerilog, compliant with a protocol’s specification, and is easily configurable to your implementation.  That way it integrates into your verification environment just as easily as if you had built it yourself.

Leading design IP providers such as ARM®, PLDA, and Northwest Logic knew that Mentor Graphics’ VIP is built on standards, is protocol compliant, and is easy to use.  In fact you can read more about what Jim Wallace, systems and software group director at ARM; Stephane Hauradou, CTO of PLDA; and Brian Daellenbach, president of Northwest Logic; have to say about Mentor Graphics’ recently introduced EZ-VIP technology for PCIe 4.0 (at this website http://www.mentor.com/company/news/mentor-verification-ip-pcie-4 ), and why they know that their customers can rely on it as well.

Verification engineers knew, too.  You can read comments from many of them (at Cooley’s website http://www.deepchip.com/items/dac14-06.html ), about their opinions on VIP.  In addition, Mercury Systems also knew.  “Mentor Graphics PCIe VIP is fully compliant with the PCIe protocol specification and with UVM coding guidelines. We found that we could drop it into our existing environment and get it up and running very quickly”, said Nick Solimini, Consulting DV Engineer at Mercury Systems. “Mentor’s support for their VIP is excellent. All our technical questions were answered promptly so we were able to be productive throughout the project”.

So, now you know,  Mentor Graphics’ Questa VIP is built on standard SV UVM, is specification compliant, is easy to get up and running and is an integral part of many successful verification environments today.  If you’d like to learn more about Questa VIP and Mentor Graphics’ EZ-VIP technology, send me an email, and I’ll let you in on what (thanks to Cooley and our customers) is no longer the best kept secret in verification.  Who knew?

Mark Olen

Mark Olen is currently a Functional Verification Technologist at Mentor Graphics Corp. He has spent thirty years in semiconductor design verification and manufacturing test, and has authored papers in the areas of intelligent testbench automation, design for test technology, and semiconductor manufacturing test automation. He wrote his first testbench in 1981 at Raytheon, and went on to spend ten years working at Teradyne in the ATE and DFT industries. He became Vice President of Cascade Microtech's thin film wafer probe division, before co-founding Lighthouse Design Automation where graph-based Intelligent Testbench Automation was first successfully applied to semiconductor design verification. Mark graduated from MIT with a BS in EE&CS.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.stage.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2015/01/14/who-knew-vip/